The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

1. How are the Voynich's words aligned with hieroglyphs? Is this approach worth trusting?

By "hieroglyphs" you mean hanzi (Chinese characters)?  On average, each Chinese character corresponds to about one Voynichese word -- a bit more or less depending on whether comas in the transcription file are considered word spaces or ignored.  And also one Chinese character corresponds to abot 5 EVA letters on average (it would be less in some other alphabets, like Currier's).

So far I have identified only a handful of "cribs" - correspondences between Chinese and Voynichese; And only one or two are reasonably certain -- like 主 = "mainly for" = daiin.  But there are many variations or errors, like kaiin or dair sometimes being substituted for daiin (variations which could be explained by confusion of similar shapes). And not every daiin is a 主, just as not every "for" in English is the preposition.

2. Exactly what similarities did you see between the SBJ and Starred Parags texts?

Those "cribs" like 主 appear in SBJ recipes at positions and intervals that match very closely the positions of the corresponding Voynichese words in certain parags, taking into account the ~1:5 hanzi:EVA ratio.  

In particular, the longest recipe of the SBJ has eight occurrences of 主, and the longest parag in the SPS (execluding three blocks of lines that are each ~10 parags mashed together) has eight occurrences of daiin and its common "misspellings", at the expected positions:

          <b1.4.096> (w1a1d0g0)  74
               3 　 丹雄鸡
            1 23 主 女人崩中漏下赤白沃补虚温中止血通神杀毒辟不祥头
            1  3 主 杀鬼肪
            1  3 主 耳聋肠
            1  7 主 遗溺肶胵裹黄皮
            1  4 主 泄利屎白
            1  8 主 消渴伤寒寒热翮羽
            1  5 主 下血闭鸡子
            1 10 主 除热火疮痫痉可作虎魄
   
   
   
      <f105v.32>   1.581  371(-3)    0.350
              8(-7)    0.669 poarkeeo
      daiin 110(-6)    0.075 qoaiinaracpheeyqoeedeodyqokaiinqotedaiinaporaiinapylsheodytaiinoteeyoteeoolotaiinokeeyqokaiinoraiiinaldalsheeo
      daiin  17(+1)    0.013 chsdqokeeeydaiino
      kaiin  22(+6)    0.371 otaiinchedaiinolkallkl
      dain   34(-1)    0.007 doeeokcheeoltaiinotcheedychoraiino
      daiin  19(-1)    0.012 chedyotaiinalkaishd
      laiin  45(+4)    0.082 sheodokeeodyqoaiinytaiinotaiinchdaldydaiiinch
      daiin  25(+0)    0.000 ockheyysheyckhysheoqoeeol
      kaiin  52(+1)    0.002 chsokoltchdysheeeyokaiinaraildycheodyoaiiinainokshey

The signed numbers in parentheses above are the difference in EVA letters between the length of each gap between consecutive pairs of daiin/kaiin/lainn/dain in that SPS parag, and the lengths of the gaps between consecutive 主  in the SBJ recipe times ~5.  Thus the 22(+6) means that the gap otaiinchedaiinolkallkl is 22 EVA letters long, which is 6 letters longer that expected, given that the gap between the correspoinding 主 is 耳聋肠; which is 3 hanzi, meaning that the expectation for the SPS gap was 3 x ~5 = 15-16 EVA letters.

These "coincidences" are seen in many other recipe-parag pairs.

3. Are there any other textual correlations between Chinese texts and the manuscript? 4. If we apply the results of the analysis on the similarity of words and hieroglyphs to other sections, will anything work out?

As I said in the other post, I don't know about other sections.  But any "cribs" that can be found in the SPS should be useful there too.  In particular, the word "mainly for" it would not be unexpected in a herbal.

All the best, --stolfi